Tuesday, February 24, 2015

In Analyze Greece appeared on 22 February 2015 an interesting article by Manolis Melissaris that sheds light on the strategy of the new Greek government in its debt talks with European finance ministers. One of its aims was to change the terms of the debate. According to Melissaris the Greek government has succeeded in introducing a democratic and social agenda in the technocratic discussions.

So a Eurogroup deal has been struck and the hatchets are buried under a thin coat of dust for now. What are we to make of this?

SYRIZA’s top realistic priorities seem to have been, or at least should
always have been, the following. First, to relax austerity to the
highest degree possible and thus address the humanitarian crisis.
Secondly, to get some breathing space which would allow the government
to implement its fiscally neutral (though of course not fiscally
indifferent) social agenda. Thirdly, to push mainstream political
discourse in Europe in a new direction.

The deal does not fully achieve the first aim and being overjoyed about
the deal in this respect is probably ill advised. Austerity will still
have to be practiced and many of the measures might still be largely at
the expense of the lower and middle social strata. This is not the whole
story though. That the Greek government can now autonomously determine
reforms, unlike any other government of the crisis years, means that it
can redirect reforms in a way that shifts burdens towards those who have
remained unaffected both by the crisis itself and the policies of the
past five years. At the time of writing this brief comment the proposed
reforms have not been announced so the jury’s still out on this.

The aim of implementing the social agenda must still be pursued and it
must be achieved. The government’s mandate is not exhausted in the
immediately urgent issue of debt. This may have, disappointingly,
monopolised political discourse in Greece for a long time, but it is
only part of the picture. Immigration, security and penal policy, human
rights, the structure of political discourse, the regulation of media
ownership, the restoration of the rule of law, institutional design and
maintenance and many other issues are just as pressing and significant.
For example, a day after the deal, protesters outside the illegal
immigrant concentration camp of Amygdaleza were dealt with very
heavy-handedly by the police. It is of the utmost urgency that such
practices change.

But what I would like to focus on is the third aim. Many, from the New
Yorker to the Guardian, seem to believe that Greece overplayed its hand
during the Eurogroup negotiations. They say that its initial demands
were maximalistic. Therefore, under the pressure of the blackmail openly
exercised by the German government and its satellites, the inevitable
retreat became a bigger defeat than it could have been.

We should not be too quick to buy into that reading of events and I’ll
explain why. From the very outset, the Greek government emphasised the
predicament of the Greek people caused by the years of austerity. It
highlighted how counterproductive the inequality generated by the
post-crisis economic policy has been. It proposed concrete measures,
which would not have aggravated the fiscal situation. It also
unfailingly flagged up the unequivocal mandate that it had so recently
been given by the Greek people.

When arguing against, and rejecting, the ‘maximalistic’ Greek requests
Germany and its satellites inevitably faced all these claims too. Much
was disclosed in this process. Here are only a few of many examples. As
it was reported, the Spanish and Portuguese governments tried to
undermine the whole deal. They were concerned with things back home.
They did not want to appear to accept that there may be an alternative
to the policies that they have been following, a concession which would
be wind in the sails of domestic opposition. Wolfgang Schäuble tried to
intervene in domestic Greek politics on a number of occasions (feeling
‘sorry’ for the Greek people for having elected an ‘irresponsible’
government and then apparently feeling sorry for the Greek government
for the difficulties it would face explaining the deal to the Greek
people). His move is transparent. He tried openly to blackmail not just
the Greeks but all European peoples and governments and to appear
domestically tough with those who do not share the ‘right’ vision of
Europe. On a deeper level, he was trying to establish that vision of
Europe as the only alternative, therefore one that remains unaffected by
democratic or principled tests. Jeroen Dijsselbloem lost his cool when
Paul Mason, the Economics Editor of Channel 4 News in the UK, asked him
what he says to the Greek people “whose democracy you’ve just trashed”.

What is significant about all this is that it happened within a European
institutional setting. Whereas the same arguments have been made in
civil society and the public sphere at large numerous times in the past,
the Greek negotiation strategy disrupted technocratic discourse with
democratic politics for the first time ever. It forced on the
institutional table the antinomy between democratic legitimacy and
economic power. It highlighted the deepest contradiction of the European
institutional structure: on the one hand distributive policies
presuppose popular sovereignty and, on the other, this is made
impossible by the economic governance of the EU.

This democratic disruption will eventually have systemic effects.
Perhaps through the emergence of the language of democracy and social
justice in official documents, a language which can then play a part in
determining the interpretation and implementation of European policies.
Perhaps through the implementation of the social justice oriented
policies that are not incompatible with the terms of the deal. Perhaps
through the fiscally neutral social agenda, which can at the very least
re-frame the fiscally onerous measures.

But it can also have a short-term, external effect. It can reveal to the
people of Europe that the clash is not between them and the Greeks or
other European peoples but rather between two visions of Europe, one of
which leaves them out of the picture altogether. It can disclose that
domestic democratic politics is not sufficient to counter global
economic forces and that isolationism cannot be the answer. It can make
the need for a European political sphere felt more strongly than ever.
It is telling that, as soon as Schäuble and the rest realised that this
is the way things are going, they engaged in a last minute attempt at
character assassination, at discrediting the Greek government and
presenting its representatives as irresponsible and incompetent. This
was quite obviously an attempt at dragging Greece back into the
technocratic game of efficiency and number-crunching. But it was already
too late for that.

In his address to the Greek people the day after the deal Alexis Tsipras
said that a battle was won but the war is still waging. If this is
really a war, its central theatre is political and the main stake is to
reinstate democratic politics in the heart of Europe. The EU does not
currently have the appropriate institutional structure for the voice of
the people of Europe, now re-animated by the institutional democratic
disruption, to be translated directly into norm-determination. But it
can be heard through social movements, in civil society, in the public
sphere. And this can only strengthen the disruption until it becomes a
rupture.

Manolis Melissaris teaches and writes on legal and political philosophy and criminal law (@EMelissaris)

About Me

As a kid I liked numbers and the sound of strings. I considered studying engineering but chose social sciences because of my interest in people. I combine a theoretical interest with a practical, social approach which brought me to the sphere of policy research. I am interested in reducing the disparity between poor and rich, between the powerful and the less powerful.
In 1973 and 1982 I lived in Latin America. In the mid-1980s, I was able to create an international forum to discuss the functioning of the international monetary system and the debt crisis, the Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD). I established it with the view that the debt crisis of the 1980s was a symptom of a malfunctioning, flawed global monetary and financial system.
I was one of the driving forces behind the creation of the European Network on Debt and Development that was established at the end of the 1980s to help put pressure on European policymakers.
In 1990, before the beginning of the Gulf War, I cofounded the Golfgroep, a discussion group about international politics comprising journalists, scientists, politicians and activists that meets regularly.
The website of FONDAD is www.fondad.org